Written by amedeo on June 3rd, 2008
Problem
Often, the who-what-where-when-why-how (and “what’s next”) get blended together in a way that is aesthetically pleasing (in terms of logic, musicality and pacing), but fail to offer easy scannability that Web reading behavior calls for.
As a reader, I have to run my eyes up and down a story to find facts that interest me [...]
Written by amedeo on June 3rd, 2008
Highlights from A New Model for News | Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption, an ethnography/report by The Associated Press and Context-Based Research Group (PDF of the report):
p. 53: Youngsters’ (18-34) news diet is made up four dishes on 2 sides of the news, eh, dinner table
On the “breaking news/headlines/what happened” side [...]
Written by amedeo on May 6th, 2008
Most recent Alertbox column from Jakob Nielsen, the “King of Usability”:
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
Why I’m interested:
There is still a lot of room for the evolution of how text is presented on a news site, [...]
Written by amedeo on January 25th, 2008
EveryBlock, from ChicagoCrime.org’s Adrian Holovaty and crew, fishes local info ponds and databases to create a new standard for the required depth of neighborhood news/information aggregation providers.
Why I like it
Making raw data made much more accessible is good journalism.
It finds and beautifully displays info from government reports (good source material for deeper stories), an aspect [...]
Written by amedeo on January 21st, 2008
Rather than having 50 million sacks into which you must stuff your data (from personal information to media and more), DataPortability wants the framework for one big sack that brave Web travelers can carry with them wherever they digitally go.
If/once such a structure takes hold on a mass scale, figuring out how to make money [...]
Written by amedeo on January 20th, 2008
What: Five of the 10 best-selling novels last year in Japan were originally cellphone novels.
Freaking out:
“Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten [...]
Written by amedeo on January 8th, 2008
Tell Idio your musical likes, and it builds your personal music magazine.
The results don’t excite me as much as the method: Drop in a bit of info about yourself, and out spits media matching (well, trying to match) your interests.
It toys with the concept of information finding us and adds a touch of design and [...]
Written by amedeo on January 6th, 2008
To steal from BBC beta home:
Giving control to the customers: Make the display of your news site customizable. Make sections draggable-droppable, expandable/hideable. Especially cool: Use “+” and “-” to add or remove a headline from the list. Some folks already do this using your RSS feeds, but this is a way to serve people uninterested [...]
Written by amedeo on December 19th, 2007
Hazy, fumbling vision of the future #9,321:
A single journalism organization covering many topics in a general fashion splits into many smaller journalism organizations, each specializing in a single topic and covering it in depth.
Information holders in positions of power receive interview requests not from tens of general journalism organization but from hundreds or thousands serving small, highly [...]
Written by amedeo on December 11th, 2007
Sign up for Persai, a “news aggregator specific to your interests” that will “find new content relevant to that interest and recommend it to you. Recommendations are based entirely on content; other users’ feedback has no bearing.”
Read Persai blog post explaining the service.
See Persai tracking Facebook news; see Persai tracking Apple news.
Trend indicated:
As machines [...]
